Abstract:
To choose an ideal location for a facility is considered as the most important problem for the
organizations seeking to locate or relocate their facilities. A facility can be defined as a building
where people, material and machines work together for a specific purpose such as to produce a
tangible product or provide a service. In addition, the problem to find an ideal location for a facility
carries great significance for the organizations as it bears high costs, hard to return and carries
long-term commitment. Moreover, it has strong influence on operating costs and revenues of the
organization. An ideal location ensures adequate supply of raw materials, market, labor, service
etc. and thus contribute largely to the overall success of the organization. While, the organizations
which have chosen poor location for facilities might face increase in the costs of transportation,
lack of skillful labor, poor supplies of raw materials, loss of competitive advantage or other similar
conditions that are essential for operations. In previous studies, it has been found that different
approaches, methods and criteria have been discussed which can provide guidelines to find a
location for a facility but none of them fully solve this problem. Moreover, there is such approach
or criteria been discussed in literature which can optimized the location of an existing facility. In
our study, we find a list of comprehensive factors which should be considered to find an ideal
location for the facility. Furthermore, a location of a facility which is already in operation has been
optimized. For this, structured interviews have been conducted with the top management of the
various organizations and find out the important factors to be considered for choosing locations
for their facilities. After that, location of a facility already in operation is selected and analyzed to
find the factors that could be optimized. Data and information related to the factors are collected.
A simulation technique based on linear programming simplex method has been used to optimize
the location of the existing facility.
